Maybe the Moon

day she died of a heart attack in the parking lot at Pack ’n Save.
    I’d met Renee when I was shopping for mock leopardskin at The Fabric Barn. (I make all my own clothes, so I’ve haunted most of the outlets between here and West L.A.) I took to her right away, since she was the only clerk in the store who didn’t lose it completely when I walked in. She was so helpful and nice, and while she was cutting the fabric she told me a “dirty joke” that would only be dirty if you were twelve years old, maybe, and living in Salt Lake City. When I explained about the leopardskin, how Mom and me were planning to crash the premiere of Out of Africa , she got so excited you would’ve thought she was waiting on Meryl Streep herself.
    “Gah,” she said, “that sounds so glamorous.”
    I reminded her that we weren’t actually invited, that the jungle getup ploy was pretty much of a long shot.
    “Still,” she said, “you’re gonna be there. You might even meet Robert Redford!”
    I resisted the urge to tell her that I had already met Mr. Redford (and found him boring), back when Mom was working asan extra on the set of The Electric Horseman . To be perfectly honest, I wanted Renee to like me not for who I knew but for who I was. “Actually,” I told her, “it’s more of a business-promo thing. I’m an actress myself.”
    “You are? Have I seen you in anything?”
    My face betrayed nothing as I moved in for the score. “Did you see Mr. Woods ?”
    Renee’s big, soft mouth went slack with wonder. “You’re kidding! That’s my most favorite movie of all. I saw it four times when I was thirteen years old!”
    I shrugged. “That was me.”
    “Where? Which one?”
    “C’mon.” I chuckled and bugged my eyes. “How many roles did they have for somebody my size?”
    The poor baby reddened like crazy. “You mean…? Well, sure, but I thought that was…wasn’t that a mechanical thingamajig?”
    “Not all the time. Sometimes it was a rubber suit.” I shrugged. “I wore the suit.”
    “You swear to God?”
    “Remember the scene where Mr. Woods leads the kids down to his hiding place by the creek?”
    “Yeah.”
    “That was me in there.”
    Renee laid her scissors down and looked at me hard. “ Really ?”
    I nodded. “Shvitzing like a pig.”
    She giggled.
    “Also,” I added, “the part at the end where they hug him goodbye.”
    Her eyes, which are huge and Hershey brown, grew glassy with remembrance. She leaned against the wall for a moment, heaving a contented sigh as she folded her hands across her pillowy breasts. She reminded me somehow of a figure on a medieval tomb. “I just love that part.”
    “I’m so glad,” I said, and really meant it, though I probably came off like Joan Crawford being gracious to her garbageman.Frankly, I’ve heard this sort of thing for a long time, so my responses have begun to sound canned to me.
    Renee didn’t notice, though; she was staring into the distance, lost in her own elfin reverie. “And the next day, when Jeremy finds that acorn in his lunch box. Gah, that was so sad . I just sat out in the mall and cried all afternoon.” After a melancholy pause, her gaze swung back to me. “I even bought the doll. One of the life-size ones. I still have it. This is so amazing.”
    “Did the eyes fall out?”
    “Excuse me?”
    “The doll,” I explained. “People tell me the eyes fall out.”
    She shook her head, looking stricken and slightly affronted, like a mother who’d just been asked if her child showed signs of malnutrition. “No,” she said. “The eyes are fine.”
    “Good.”
    “Do you totally swear you’re him?”
    I held up my palm. “Totally swear.”
    “This is so amazing.”
    When I finally left the store, Renee was my escort, keeping pace a little awkwardly, but obviously thrilled to be seen in my company. I could feel the eyes of the other clerks on us as we threaded our way through the upright rolls of silk and satin. I knew Renee would tell them about me afterwards, and that made me gloat on her behalf. These gawking idiots would find that her friendliness had actually counted for something; that she’d had the last laugh, after all; that she wasn’t the blonde airhead they had probably figured her for.

    I became a regular at The Fabric Barn. Since none of my outfits requires more than a yard of material, Renee would save odd remnants she thought I’d like: bits of rich, dark velvet or peacock satin or pink pajama flannel